Stuff Case

advances, highly skewed trade practices, and wild financial speculation, are leaving the vast majority of humanity far behind, in India as well as everywhere else. Contrary to the reassurances of neoliberal theory, as the sea of money continues to rise, uplifting the ships of the rich, small boats continue, inexplicably, to sink.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the relative disparity in wealth between what we now term the first and third worlds was roughly three to one; by the 1990s, that ratio had extended past 140 to 1, and continues steadily widening. A report published in 2006 by the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University found that "the richest 1 percent of adults owned 40 percent of global assets in the year 2000, and . . . the richest 10 percent of adults accounted for 85 percent of the world's total. In contrast, the assets of half of the world's adult population account for barely 1 percent of global wealth." At present, studies indicate that one billion human beings currently face starvation or severely debilitating levels of malnutrition. Two billion lack access to potable water. Even within the richest country of the world, one percent of the people controls more wealth than the combined assets of 95% of the total population.

Critics have excoriated Adiga's lack of "plausibility": for example, in his depiction of women in the Darkness leaping ferociously on their men when they return home, after long periods of absence, with the meager wages they have earned in distant cities. The scene in question is extreme, and obviously exaggerated for effect:

A month before the rains, the men came back from Dhanbad and Delhi and Calcutta, leaner, darker, angrier, but with money in their pockets. The women were waiting for them. They hid behind the door, and as soon as the men walked in, they pounced, like wildcats on a slab of flesh. There was fighting and wailing and shrieking. My uncles would resist, and managed to keep some of their money, but my father got peeled and skinned every time. . . . The women would feed him after they fed the buffalo. (22)

But this is not a contravention of standards of believability, but rather deliberate distortion employed as cutting edge technique in radical social critique. In satire, usual constraints of plausibility become inevitably broadly stretched - so much so that they quickly seem almost irrelevant. We do not cast aside Gulliver's Travels during the opening pages simply because the protagonist abruptly wakes up a giant and discovers his disproportionately large, grotesque form surrounded by hordes of little people determined to entrap him in the meshes of a tightly woven spider web of entangling sewing thread. We understand at once that "realism" has been chucked out the window in order to display and convey, via exaggeration and distortion, a reality we dare not (indeed cannot) perceive from our usual "normal," conventional perspective. This same theoretical viewpoint must be applied to the frequently bizarre representations of extreme economic disparity offered up for our perusal and consideration in the contorted world that Adiga creates.

The key figure in White Tiger, apart from the enigmatic metaphor of the supposedly rare albino cat itself, is that of the "entrepreneur." Adiga introduces the term on the very first page: the entire purpose of Balram's late